Online advertisements that contain appropriate images advantageously attract attention, foster positive feelings towards brands, and are generally more effective than advertisements that do not contain such images in persuading people to click-through the advertisements to obtain additional information about the advertised products and/or services. Online advertising platforms are increasingly considering adding image-containing advertisements to their contextual-advertising business (i.e., advertisements hosted on web pages), for example, Google™ has incorporated image-containing advertisements as an additional service in their AdSense Contextual advertisement program, and Yahoo® also added image-containing advertisement in their contextual lineup.
Different choices regarding the composition elements of an image-containing advertisement may impact differently on: (1) how much attention is attracted to an image-containing advertisement and attraction; and (2) click-through rates. For example, female users may be attracted to certain colors, while male users are attracted to different colors. The advertisers using a contextual-adverting platform may have an option to choose which words they want to target, and then choose from a wide range of colors and templates, to customize their image-composition elements, including, but not limited to size, location, dominant color, number of colors, color combination, text font, URL link location, and the like.